Free The Boys Start the War by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

drawing.
    When the papers were collected fifteen minutes later, Caroline was not even sure what she had written. And on the way out the door to recess, she poked Wally in the back. “You give me my paper or else,” she said angrily.
    Wally just smiled. “Meet me at the swinging bridge at seven-thirty this evening, and crawl down the path on your hands and knees,” he said, and headed for the door.
    Caroline was beside herself. This was blackmail! Beth and Eddie would never forgive her for doing something so stupid.
    It was a horrible day, and as soon as school was out, Caroline charged out the door like a hornet and told Eddie and Beth what had happened. The Hatford boys had already headed for home, and were looking at the girls over their shoulders, laughing and hooting as they went.
    When Caroline and her sisters reached the swinging bridge, Caroline was too angry to go home. Too angry to speak, almost. She stood glaring after the Hatford boys as they went up on the porch of their house and slammed the door. And then she saw something else: clothes drying on the clothesline in back of their house.
    “Wait here,” she told Beth and Eddie.
    She marched right up on the Hatfords’ lawn. Without looking to the right or left she stalked around to the back, grabbed a pair of Jockey shorts off the clothesline, then ran for her life as the boys came out on the porch and stared.
    Waving the Jockey shorts high in the air, she tore across the swinging bridge, Beth and Eddie behind her, and didn’t stop until they were safely in their house and up in Caroline’s room.
    “Wonderful!” said Eddie.
    “I’ll show them all around school!” Caroline declared. “I’ll tell everyone in my class they’re Wally’s. ‘How are your Munsingwears today?’ I’ll ask him. He and his brothers don’t get back their flashlight or shorts until they return my drawing of Miss Applebaum and get down on one knee and apologize.”
    The phone rang.
    “I’ll bet they want to exchange things right now,” Beth said, giggling, as the girls dashed out in the hall. “They can’t even wait until evening.”
    Caroline picked up the phone. “Malloy Musketeers, Caroline speaking.”

    There was a short pause at the other end. And then a man’s voice said, “Caroline, this is Mr. Hatford, across the river. I wonder if you would mind returning my briefs.”

W ally, Josh, Jake, and Peter stood still as cement as their father made the phone call.
    Mr. Hatford turned around, phone in hand.
    “She says she’ll return my briefs if you return her paper, Wally. Do you know what she’s talking about?”
    Wally nodded and swallowed. “Tell her I’ll return the paper if she returns the flashlight.”
    Mr. Hatford spoke into the phone again. “He says he’ll return the paper if you return the flashlight. Don’t ask me what’s going on around here. I’m only their father.… Okay, five minutes from how on the bridge.… He’ll be there.”
    Wally’s father put down the telephone and looked at the boys. “That wouldn’t be my flashlight she’s talking about, would it?”
    Wally nodded still again.
    “Is this what goes on in the afternoons whenI’m not here? People run off with my flashlight and shorts? I get home early for the first time in a couple of months, and what do I see? Some girl leaving our yard at sixty miles an hour waving my underwear in the wind!”
    “She’s the Crazie,” Peter explained soberly.
    “Well, if you’ve got something of hers, Wally, you get on out to the bridge and give it back. I want my briefs and my flashlight back, and anything else that’s missing. What do they want next? Socks? Toothbrush? Keys? They holding a garage sale or something?”
    Wally went to his room for Caroline’s drawing of Miss Applebaum.
    “You guys have to come too,” he murmured to the others, and they all followed him out the door.
    For a minute or so they trudged silently across the yard and over to the other side of the